Lynn Linder will present "Writing the Angel out of the House: The Diaries of Pauline Trevelyan, 1816-1866" from 12:30-1:30 p.m. Thursday, April 14, in McGannon Hall, Room 144.

Everyone is welcome. Bring your lunches. Refreshments will be provided.

Hope to see you there.

About the talk:The phrase, "angel in the house," taken from the title of Coventry Patmore's 1854 poem, became synonymous with the publically touted vision of ideal femininity in Victorian Britain.

Represented in countless works of literature and non-fiction, the model Victorian woman was a submissive wife, devoted mother, and paragon of moral virtue, who remained in her proper place within the domestic sphere. But what happens to this socially constructed vision of womanhood when we look beyond published texts and explore the private writings of Victorian women?

In her talk, Lynn M. Linder examines the diary of Lady Pauline Trevelyan (1816-1866), a clergyman's daughter and wife of Naturalist and Scientist, Sir Walter Calverley Trevelyan, who was an accomplished amateur artist, art reviewer and critic, and member of the Pre-Raphaelite circle. Trevelyan's experiences reflect a life that challenges traditional notions of Victorian womanhood and the autobiographical traces she left behind -- in both content and form -- construct a female subjectivity that disrupts a strictly dichotomous conception of gender in early Victorian Britain.

Crisscrossing the pages of Trevelyan's diaries reveals multifaceted fissures along the ideological borders of private and public constructions of self, gender roles of men and women, and the domestic and publics spheres, perhaps ultimately asking us to redefine Victorian culture through the pages of women's diaries.

Lynn M. Linder is a Ph.D. candidate in the English department. Her dissertation, "Unlocking the Victorian Diary: Gender, the Journal, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction," examines male and female constructions of self within the diary form and explores the connection between diary writing practices and fictional representations of diaries in Victorian novels.